Development Architect (f/m/d) - AI Foundation Model Training and Serving

Job Description

We help the world run better
At SAP, we keep it simple: you bring your best to us, and we'll bring out the best in you. We're builders touching over 20 industries and 80% of global commerce, and we need your unique talents to help shape what's next. The work is challenging – but it matters. You'll find a place where you can be yourself, prioritize your wellbeing, and truly belong. What's in it for you? Constant learning, skill growth, great benefits, and a team that wants you to grow and succeed.

What you`ll do:

At SAP Business AI, we are exploring the next frontier of AI on structured business data like graphs, tables and more. Foundation Models on structured data, like SAP-RPT-1, have ushered in the GenAI era for business relevant scenarios. Now, we are pushing further. We want to enable companies across all industries to collaboratively train foundation models and build knowledge graphs.

As an architect for the AI side of an open data platform for foundation model training, working alongside our lead Platform Architect, you will design and guide implementation of the AI stack — distributed training, federated training across customer sites, model lifecycle (fine-tuning, distillation, evaluation), deployment and serving of multi-modal foundation models. Your work will complement existing AI platforms and overcome gaps when it comes to bringing together current foundation model training approaches, symbolic approaches, and enterprise data in a distributed, heterogeneous environment.

This is the ideal role for an ambitious, highly focused individual who can drive profound technical alignments, as well as swiftly maneuver in a dynamic environment with multiple involved teams and a high degree of senior management attention.

The Role:

• Drive technical architecture and design topics of the AI training, evaluation, and serving stack within the open platform for industries – partnering with the lead Platform Architect on cross-cutting design

• Architect distributed and federated training infrastructure: cluster orchestration, parallelism strategies, checkpointing, fault tolerance, and secure aggregation across customer data sites

• Design the model lifecycle: fine-tuning, post-training, evaluation and benchmarking pipelines, model registries

• Architect inference and serving for industrial scale: multi-tenant deployment, dynamic batching, KV caching, quantization, and latency/cost trade-offs across cloud and on-prem environments

• Ensure secure, policy-compliant handling of proprietary industrial datasets and models – authentication, lineage, provenance, licensing metadata, and data residency for federated training

• Coordinate effectively with technical, product, and management stakeholders across multiple involved teams and ensure alignment with the overarching technical concepts and project vision

• Support delivery teams with your deep technical guidance on AI model training, evaluation and serving

What you bring:

• 8+ years of experience architecting AI / foundation-model ML/AI solutions

• Hands-on experience designing distributed training systems for large models – cluster orchestration, parallelism (DDP/FSDP/TP/PP), checkpointing, fault tolerance – and ideally with federated training across organizational boundaries

• Hands-on knowledge on foundation model fine-tuning (incl. RLHF/DPO/distillation), evaluation pipelines, and serving at scale and serving

• Strong hands-on software engineering skills, proficiency in Python and at least one other programming language

• Working knowledge of inference serving systems (e.g., vLLM) and serving trade-offs (batching, KV cache, quantization, latency vs. cost) is a strong plus

• Ability to translate business and research requirements into robust, scalable technical platform designs

• Experienced in collaborating effectively with product, consulting and customer teams, as well as other stakeholders

• Strong communication and documentation skills for technical stakeholders (engineers, data scientists, architects)

• Being comfortable working in a complex, evolving environment with multiple partners, technologies and dependencies, iterating the architecture as components evolve

Meet your team:

SAP's AI organization is dedicated to seamlessly infusing AI into all enterprise applications, enabling customers, partners, and developers to enhance business processes and generate remarkable business value. Join our international AI team where innovation thrives, opportunities for personal development abound, and exceptional colleagues collaborate globally.

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Bring out your best
SAP innovations help more than four hundred thousand customers worldwide work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively. Originally known for leadership in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, SAP has evolved to become a market leader in end-to-end business application software and related services for database, analytics, intelligent technologies, and experience management. As a cloud company with two hundred million users and more than one hundred thousand employees worldwide, we are purpose-driven and future-focused, with a highly collaborative team ethic and commitment to personal development. Whether connecting global industries, people, or platforms, we help ensure every challenge gets the solution it deserves. At SAP, you can bring out your best.

We win with inclusion
SAP’s culture of inclusion, focus on health and well-being, and flexible working models help ensure that everyone – regardless of background – feels included and can run at their best. At SAP, we believe we are made stronger by the unique capabilities and qualities that each person brings to our company, and we invest in our employees to inspire confidence and help everyone realize their full potential. We ultimately believe in unleashing all talent and creating a better world.

SAP is committed to the values of Equal Employment Opportunity and provides accessibility accommodations to applicants with physical and/or mental disabilities. If you are interested in applying for employment with SAP and are in need of accommodation or special assistance to navigate our website or to complete your application, please send an e-mail with your request to Recruiting Operations Team: Careers@sap.com.

For SAP employees: Only permanent roles are eligible for the SAP Employee Referral Program, according to the eligibility rules set in the SAP Referral Policy. Specific conditions may apply for roles in Vocational Training.

AI Usage in the Recruitment Process

For information on the responsible use of AI in our recruitment process, please refer to our Guidelines for Ethical Usage of AI in the Recruiting Process.

Please note that any violation of these guidelines may result in disqualification from the hiring process.

Requisition ID: 455051 | Work Area: Software-Design and Development | Expected Travel: 0 - 10% | Career Status: Professional | Employment Type: Regular Full Time | Additional Locations: #LI-Hybrid

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